Holes In Thoughts: Paragraph length

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Paragraph length

Upon reading this excellent article about the inverse relationship between legislative experience and presidential abilities, it struck me how short the paragraphs are. They're almost blog-like in length. I liked the article's content a great deal, but I thought it was very nicely readable as well. I've noticed that occasionally when media is transfered from print to Web, the longer paragraphs make things harder to read.

This begs the question whether paragraph lengths are, as a whole in well-educated writing, becoming shorter. A study done in 1992 (and therefore not aware of its significance vis a vis the Web) summarized:

[The study investigates] whether readers are aware of and have any preferences about paragraph length. Finds that readers are aware and have a more positive attitude toward writing with paragraphs of less than 100 words. Finds that paragraph length does not affect attitudes toward the expertise of the writer, ease of comprehension, or quality of the passage.

So there you go. I've been fretting over whether or not I sounded well-educated since I habitually use two- or three- sentence paragraphs, but apparently all that matters is that I need to have a complete point in each one. I also habitually use very long sentences extended by parentheticals, semicolon extensions and lists. I should stop that, but apparently the paragraphs are O.K.

So it seems that the more finely-chopped paragraphs seen most often in blogs will become more common. Long, meandering paragraphs that looked good (4 to 10 lines or so) in the printed page look so much more monolithic on the Web, where text is wrapped more often, so we'll see more breaks in paragraphs.

If shorter paragraphs mean more pointed logic, that's good, but if it means less useful information, I'm not sure this is a good thing. I fear the latter - we have enough sound-byte commentary as it is. A good example is that Hillary keeps crowing experience when she's not half as experienced as the people who are already out of the race; but people only know about the experience angle.

Labels: blog, english, Obama, politics, writing

posted by Steve @ 11:07 AM

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